Reflections

I finally managed to see the movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai. A great movie with an excellent mix of humour and sentiment. On top of all this the film has a message! In fact it has been a long time since I last watched a Hindi movie till the climax. Munna’s transition from Dadagiri in the first movie to Gandhigiri in the sequel has been handled very well by the director. Some Innovative ideas like Munna sending flowers to Lucky have been combined with some interesting sequences where Munna advices the common people on Gandhigiri through FM radio. The movie has a message that Gandhism still is relevant and works magic. The movie has infact caught the attention of so many people all over the world. There have been several Munna style protests all over the world and so much talks on Gandhigiri. The Prime Minister of India , Dr. Manmohan Singh , has said, "I was heartened to see recently that back home in India the most popular movie this festival season is a film about a young man's d...

Logging into Blogger after quite some time though I did reflect on a lot of things during the time in between :-) I was over to one of my relatives house accompanying my wife (as a chaffeur) for Navarathiri. I happened to see the Dasvatharam Bommais (Mini Idols of the ten incarnations of Vishnu). I was gazing at them for quite some time and to me the ten incarnations seemed to have a deeper meaning. Though the Gita says that Vishnu takes an avatar whenever there is a threat to dharma, to me they seem to have a close link with several stages in the evolution of the universe, the evolution of mankind. What a nice way of building stories around each stage and carrying it forward over generations? Our ancestors seem to have been way ahead scientifically when other races were roaming around as savages. We seem to have lost our way somewhere and wasted time and money in pompousness, thanks to some foolish kings in between. Here are the Ten avatars Matsya - Lord Vishnu as a fish Koorma - Lor...

Another translation. This one is the song "Achamillai Achamillai" by Subramanya Bharathy We have no fear, We have no fear We know not of that thing called fear We might be against the whole world We might be cast like dust and dismissed We might be made to beg for food We might be losing everything we cherish but We have no fear, We have no fear We know not of that thing called fear The heavens above might crash The heavens above might crash and Crush us in all their fury but We would still have no fear We have no fear, We have no fear We know not of that thing called fear!

I am sure you must have seen the movie or read about “ The Titanic ”. Did you notice the role of the music band in the titanic towards the end of the movie? I lead a big Programme as part of my work. A programme consisting of multiple components but all working towards a common goal (atleast they are supposed to). Quite often I find my teams totally lost in day to day delivery pressures and myself struggling to bring them out of that. There is absolute chaos all over the place. The major problem I face is that there is not enough collaboration between teams as required, people left to themselves are happy operating in individual silos and view the other teams as competitors. My major worry is that people are not ready to look at the bigger picture, pressurised by and used to traditional working models and are finally not focused on the value delivered collectively. I am not blaming my team. I understand what they are going through and I myself am struggling to find out of ways of gett...

I have found that I am at my creative best on Saturdays and Sundays. Now don’t ask me how creative I am. That is definitely a debatable topic and we can take that up sometime later. That is why I chose my words carefully. I have observed over the past year or so that I get most of my new ideas during the weekends. I am talking about ideas related to my work. I take necessary action through emails immediately but I get lost in mundane affairs (thanks to official pressures) during the week and by the time I am reminded of my ideas I find myself in the next weekend again. Maybe it’s the relaxed and informal environment at home which helps unleash my creativity. I really feel that I do a lot more productive work from home over the weekends even if I spend a few hours compared to what I do in office in a whole week. All enterprises today talk a lot about innovation and drive their employees to innovate but based on my experience I have never seen anything materialize. Is talking about innov...

Hutch is now Vodafone! I am not sure if you have seen the ad. What a wonderful depiction of change! This is an ad that has been picturised beautifully. The first ad that I remember announcing a change in name is that of Binaca becoming Cibaca. Most of you might not even know about Cibaca. I am not sure if the company or the toothpaste it used to sell exists today. It was a simple ad announcing a change in name but I still remember listening to it over a small Philips radio and seeing it in a black and white TV nearly two decades ago (as a small boy!). The ad did make an impact those days and there were many jokes and discussions around that. We live in a technologically advanced age now and the Vodafone ad is definitely on a different plane. In short the new Vodafone ad is about a dog leaving its kennel briefly and coming back to see a new Kennel totally different in design and color, struggling to get in terms with the reality in front of it. I don’t know how they made the dog act so ...

“I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere” said Jawaharlal Nehru . I find myself in a similar situation, atleast partly. Thanks to the Western culture that has crept in majorly into our country, a lot of questions arise in the name of scientific thinking! Nehru felt out of place 60 years back because he was ahead of time but today I think this is common and atleast I don’t feel out of place now. My daughter participated in a Bhagavad Gita recital competition recently and this turned my attention towards the Bhagavad Gita. The most important thing is that she won a prize and it was a pleasure watching the gleam in her eyes when she shared this news with me. Coming back to the Bhagavad gita, after some struggle going through some translations on the net, I finally managed to come across a simple translation in Tamil by Subramanya Bharathi . I really wonder why translations of great works are so complicated, whether it is the Gita or...

Dream … Dream … Dream Dreams transform into thoughts And thoughts result in actions … Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam travels all over India repeating this to the children he meets. I was thinking till now that he was referring to dreaming with eyes open, about having a vision. I thought that this is different from the dreams one gets during sleep. The dreams that one has during sleep, I felt, were more related to the fears and disturbances that one has in day to day life. I now feel that I have found a different meaning and that both are related. Read on. . Because dreams are very important and they give a lot of insight into the person that we are. I recently came across the book “ The Interpretation of dreams ” which is a translation of Sigmund Freud’s acclaimed work on analysis of dreams. Interestingly I came across this book because over the past two months I got some slightly strange dreams which left me wondering whether I was undergoing a total change in character and I was wishing if I co...

I cooked up this joke for my team. Inspiration was a Khushwant Singh joke on lawyers that I had read sometime back but I customized it for the scenario my team is used to. God wanted to build a completely new IT stack to replace all his legacy systems and he wanted it to be a SOA based architecture. He floated a tender and there was heavy competition between heaven and hell. Finally God decided to give it to both because being god he was anyway never going to pay anyone and this option gave him a choice. Though he gave the project to both he was expecting heaven to do a better job than hell. So heaven and hell were given the task of delivering the architecture in seven 90 day cycles. Unfortunately God was too much in touch with the latest and he wanted the development to be done in a completely Agile manner. He wanted to be involved throughout the development and wanted a working demonstration of software at the end of each cycle. God scheduled regular standup calls with both heaven ...

I was trying to arrive at a suitable name for my blog and I suddenly hit upon the name reflections. My intention was just to share my random musings on whatever I felt like. To present my thoughts as they occurred to me. I somehow liked this idea that I read somewhere some time which said “If you have a problem with someone or something repeatedly, take a peek at the mirror”. Reflections seemed a very apt name to me. Little did I realize then that words could be interpreted in several ways! I was just reading Sigmund Freud today and to my surprise he had a lot to say on reflections. Here goes Freud in his own simple language of a Psychiatrist! The whole frame of mind of a man who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own psychical processes. In reflection there is one more psychical activity at work than the most attentive self observation. This is shown amongst other things by the tense looks and wrinkle forehead of a person pursuing his reflection...

I just finished reading this article on Krishna http://veda.harekrsna.cz/encyclopedia/historical-krsna.htm On a Sunday night almost half asleep I let my thoughts wander. What does Krishna really mean to me? I have been hearing about Krishna for more than 30 years now. Did Krishna really exist? Was he really an incarnation of the Lord Vishnu? The Lord who came down to earth in human form to destroy the evil? I don’t know if I can justify any of the above but I don’t doubt the existence of Krishna. I am sure he was a historic figure who lived several years before the birth of Christ. I do believe there are several parts of the story about Krishna which could be true. Krishna must have been a great ruler. A prince who led a simple life and was close to the masses. A very knowledgeable person who was able to understand the essence of the Yogas and Upanishads and present them in a simpler form, the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t want to get into an analysis on Krishna’s wives but then all rulers of...

In a rare moment of inspiration, I translated a Tamil song by Subramanya Bharathi which starts with the words "Sendradhini meeladhu moodare", not word by word though! Don't get me wrong with the opening line if you just happened to be reflecting on your past. Oh fool brooding over thy past! Think not about the past for What has gone is gone and never will it return Think you were born today Live and enjoy every moment Your sorrow will vanish and never will it return

I read the following (given in Italics) in one of the blogs that I visit frequently. It is supposed to be an excerpt from the Preface of the book How? by Dov Sideman . I still haven't bought that book but this touches upon something I have been thinking about for the past few days."What is the motivation for me to go to work every morning?" I don't want you to assume that I am indicating that it is some kind of Celestine Prophecy that made me come across this post. It is not that I am not a believer, it is just that I am not a great believer of prophecy! Coming to what I wanted to say, How many of us will be able to give a clear answer to such a question? "What is the motivation for you to go to work every morning?" An answer with a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. At this point you are mostly thinking that I am either getting old or I have a lot of time at my disposal. I am not denying that, I am getting a lot more mature and most people link maturity...

When I wanted to start a blog, the first thing I wanted to write was something on my mom. She was the main source of inspiration in my life, she still is... My mom was a truly amazing person. She had an unbelievable mix of good qualities, some of which I have seen in shades in some really good people I have known over years. In fact I should say everything about her was good. The best thing she did to me was the confidence that she instilled in me. I would have been nothing without her. Right from my childhood, she gave me the feeling that I was the most knowledgeable person, the best in everything, when she had so much within her. The greatest thing about her was that she was there for me always, a shoulder to lean, eyes to cry for me (though not in front of me), heart to pray and a patient ear to listen. She was like the Sun, my source of energy and inspiration. She still is, it is just that she is not there with me physically at the moment, like the Sun is not visible to us at times...